Phenomenology, History, Biosemiotics: Heideggerian and Batesonian Poetics in John Burnside's Post-Romantic Process Ecology

Abstract

"I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature". --William Wordsworth, Preface to 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'. "...the mutability of the external meeting the mutability of the internal". --Jorie Graham, 'The Art of Poetry, No. 85'. Rupert Hilyard's editorial for 'Green Letters' 10 noted the claim to John Burnside's 'ecocritical significance' by reading my discursive ruminations as vehicles to 'a kind of transcendental biosemiosis' (Hildyard, 2009: 4). This formulation - an emphasis on the role and importance of individual consciousness coupled to a scientifically grounded non-anthropocentric account of communication throughout nature - needs to be clarified and given rigorous ground for further studies that lay stress on the perceiver's vital and central role in determining meaning, and studies that disclose where and how communication flows. Burnside's career history in information systems and botany informs his association with process metaphysics, environmental temporality and phenomenology that have lead him to clarify his aesthetic-politico position in the following terms: 'living as a spirit' (Burnside, 2003b: 19), 'the science of belonging' (Crawford, 2006: 91), and to express a belief in 'a contingent self and a non-contingent soul' (Burnside, 200a: 22). These are a singular, cohesive theme in Burnside's poetry that suggests a biosemiotic version of Jonathan Bate's notion of the ecopoem perhaps heralding a 'post-phenomenological inflection of high Romantic poetics' (Bate, 2000: 262). I introduce how this can be witnessed in recent output by Burnside and then turn to earlier work to argue for a post-transcendental emergent poetics that reclaims a sense of affirmation of natural relationships (including physical and semiotic flows) as conscientious acknowledgement. I claim that this affirmation is scaffolded by an understanding of interactions between organisms and their environment. In Burnside's concern for social ecology and pragmatics, such scaffolding brings to light the poetic attempt to position an embodied interpretant within the lyrical 'I'. When the acknowledgement of world via an ecological consciousness / embodied interpretant interacts with an expanded understanding of communication it constitutes a bio-anthropological stance.